Etiqueta: Apps

This HBR Insight Center on the future of advertising will explore the transformation. We’ll dig into the technologies that are reinventing how companies connect with customers, and look at how big data and new analytic tools are allowing advertisers to fine tune and microtarget their messaging in real time. Our bloggers will also examine the new breed of consumer that, increasingly, rejects interruptive messages and demands that advertising present itself only when invited — and then only if the message offers value. And we’ll look at consumers’ growing involvement in advertising, both as arbiters and creative collaborators. This exploration happens in tandem with our spotlight on advertising in the March issue of HBR.

Earlier this week, Facebook released an update for its iOS application, integrating popular features from the stand-alone Camera and Messenger apps. On Friday, the site’s engineering team shared how they use these apps to see what shutterbugs and messaging mavens like best before they tweak the main app.

The holy grail for a brand on Facebook is the advocate. But how does a brand turn an everyday Facebook fan into someone who is willing to share and speak positively about the company? Ambassador, a social referral platform, laid out a timeline illustrating how a user becomes a brand advocate.

Facebook set the marketing world abuzz when it began testing two features: opt-in notifications for page updates (so users can be pinged whenever a page they have chosen posts) and a separate pages feed (where users can see all posts from all pages they’ve liked). Jason Weaver, CEO of Shoutlet, a social media marketing service that works with top consumer brands, told AllFacebook recently that he thinks this is a chance for companies to re-establish connections with fans.

Have you ever gone through your friends list and wondered, “How do I know this person?” There’s actually a way to see all engagement between yourself and a friend — friendship pages, which recently got the timeline treatment.

Trying to think of a way to create a fun contest that will make Facebook fans engage with your brand? Stop thinking. Wishpond, which is now stepping into the social marketing world, has launched an easy way for brands to reach out to their fans through Facebook and other avenues.

Users are increasingly finding new ways to find offline uses for Facebook. The latest? Postgram Direct, which allows a user to send a real-life postcard to someone featuring Facebook photos. Sincerely, the parent company, announced Thursday that Postagram Direct has partnered with Gap to allow users to send free postcards to friends and relatives.

Actor George Takei has been a fierce opponent of the way Facebook determines which users see certain posts from pages. After reading an open letter from an aggravated page administrator to Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Takei said he’s writing about Facebook’s algorithm — which many people refer to as EdgeRank — in his upcoming book.

One of the biggest challenges facing Facebook marketers is the plight of gaining engagement. Brands and other page administrators have tried to figure out the best types of posts to rack up more likes, comments, and shares — and most important, to play into Facebook’s algorithm. An infographic from American Express OPEN and SocialMouths shows some simple ways to make a page’s posts more popular.

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How to Be an Entrepreneur at Your Day Job
by Cristi Young | image credit: Shutterstock

As an entrepreneur, two things are probably true at some point in your career trajectory.

First, thinking like an entrepreneur is nearly impossible to turn off. If you’re driven to be a self-starter and creator, odds are that you’re constantly thinking and planning. Secondly, there will come a time — barring any unforeseen angel investors or trust funds — that you’ll need to take a job before fully branching out on your own.

Although startup costs vary, launching your own vision does come as some price, which means many budding entrepreneurs find themselves working a day job — planning for their dreams while feeling chained to a desk.

While technology is supposed to make our lives easier, it has also left many of us feeling more stressed. We have emails rolling in at all times, phone calls in the car and, thanks to Wi-Fi, we can conduct business almost anytime from anywhere. The workday never seems to end — and that’s not healthy.

It may be impossible to unplug your life, so try these five, free apps for your iPhone, iPad or Android phone to help relieve stress:

1. Breathe2Relax: This simple app guides you through a series of deep, controlled breathing exercises that can relieve stress and leave you feeling more energized. Breathe2Relax uses a combination of visual and audio cues to slow your breathing rhythm while soft music plays in the background. The app allows you to adjust the inhale and exhale length, as well as the number of cycles.

This morning a new Twitter+celebrity+charge-to-look-at-my-posts service called Pheed was launched to much fanfare…on Forbes, and not a whole lot outside of that. Unfortunately, most of the press to be had…

Raven Tools mobile app is a must-have if youíre already a Raven user; it ís easily the most comprehensive toolkit on this list. While the app is free, the subscription cost makes this something of a luxury alternative to Google Analytics or other free tools. Raven covers many SEO indicators that others miss, like social mentions and a clearer connection between marketing expenses and their impact on revenue. If you’re willing to take the plunge and make a big investment, Raven Tools is the obvious choice, and this app is the only one you need.

Which classes of apps eat the most data? Which single apps in each category are the least data-efficient? We tested various popular Android apps to find out.

Are you aware of how much data your smartphone’s apps are using up? Android phones are averaging about 583 megabytes (MB) of data usage monthly, according to 2011 stats from Nielson.

Some apps are far worse than others when it comes to data usage, and it’s important to know which ones are the hogs, especially for those on limited or low-end data plans.

And limited or capped data plans appear to be the wave of the future. For instance, AT&T offers tiered plans ranging from 300MB to 3 gigabytes (GB) per month. When you exceed your monthly allotment of data, your carrier either throttles down your speed or hits you with expensive overage charges.

We tested the data usage of popular apps in six different categories to find out which are easiest and hardest on data. If one of your go-to apps is a data hog, you may be able to find a similar app that does the same things but uses less data.

Many doctors believe that using apps that keep track of your health will help cut down on doctor visits, a new infographic suggests.

According to data revealed by Float Mobile Learning, 40% of doctors believe that using mobile health technologies such as apps that monitor fitness and eating habits can reduce the number of office visits needed by patients. About 88% of doctors are in full support of patients monitoring their health at home, especially when it comes to watching weight, blood sugar and vital signs, and many believe consumers should take advantage of the apps currently on the market to help along the process.

“With the forthcoming changes to the U.S. healthcare system, there will be an increased focus on wellness programs and preventative medicine,” Chad Udell, managing director of Float Mobile Learning, told Mashable. “Mobile health offers a tremendous opportunity for people to become more involved in their own health and wellness.”

It’s no secret that the mobile health industry is growing. There are more than 10,000 medical and healthcare apps available for download in the Apple App Store, making it the third-fastest growing app category among iPhone and Android users.

Doctors are also getting in on the trend, as 80% said they use smartphones and medical apps.
Physicians are also 250% more likely to own a tablet than other consumers.

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While millions of people share the dream of working from home, very few understand its difficulties.

From online distractions to technical malfunctions, online entrepreneurs and freelancers face thousands of potential setbacks, each one threatening a decline in income or a pause in cash flow. We’re all familiar with this problem.

Yet the problem doesn’t affect every designer and developer. With so many tools available, anyone can optimize their work routine and increase productivity.

Becoming productive is about changing not only your behavior, but also your office environment, work style and software.

By using the right collection of software, online applications and utilities, changing your routine and managing your business can be fairly simple.

The following 14 applications are geared toward the design industry but would be effective in almost any online field.

From security to legal simplicity, there are hundreds of reasons to insist on a contract before starting a project. EchoSign is a simple online contract application that allows you to send and edit agreements before commencing a project. The pricing plans are clear, and the system itself is secure-some of the world’s largest banks, wholesalers and client-driven businesses use it.

I used to read The Times every single day of the week. I loved their sports coverage and it was my “go to” newspaper. Then the pay wall went up and I stopped reading. I didn’t stop reading because they were asking me to pay but I stopped because I really couldn’t be bothered adding in my credit card details and going through the sign up process. What the Times needed to get in order to get my custom was a one click solution that allowed me to make a micro payment without even thinking about it. It looks like Paypal could be about to launch that very system with word that the payment giant is about to have a stab at the micro payment market. I wanted to have a look at just how effective micropayments could be and if they could possibly help some of the struggling newspapers and content producers out there who are all scrambling around for a business model.

Reducing The Friction

Nobody wants to pay for content online because the friction of getting your credit card out is just too painful and time consuming. With a new solution where you pre-load you Paypal account and just click a button without evening thinking about it I think the chances of people paying for content increase massively. I still check the headlines every day on The Times but I don’t go in because of the friction but if I saw something that caught my eye at simply had to make a payment of a couple of cents then that is something that I might just do.

Freemium Model

For this to work really well I think publishers will still have to give away a significant amount of their content for free. I can only really see people paying tiny amounts for the really special content that they can’t find elsewhere. Maybe a special live streamed show or a expert analysis from well known journalists. To make this business model really work publishers need to attract large volumes of people and then convert a small percentage of them in to revenue by enticing them to click through to the really good content via micro payments. Seguir leyendo “Can PayPal Micro Payments Save Newspapers And Other Content Producers?”→

In August Chris Andersen and Michael Wolf wrote an article for Wired Magazine under the title, The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet. The article talks about how the internet is moving away from the wide open web as viewed through a browser and toward a semi-closed web viewed through apps.

This paradigm shift has many implications that impact web designers as well as SEOs and I want to talk about this shift and what it means for those of us working online by looking at some of the other articles that have followed the Wired article and adding my thoughts to the mix.

I’m guessing many of you own a smart phone and possibly another mobile device capable of connecting to the internet. I own both an iPhone and an iPad and I have to agree that more and more I use an app instead of a browser to interact with content online.

Chris begins his portion of the Wired article describing a typical day in which you check email on an ipad or smart phone and move on to using Twitter and Facebook apps. Maybe you take in the NY Times and read through a list of feeds in two more apps. At the end of the day you unwind by playing games against friends on the Xbox Live or watch a movie over Netflix.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.

More and more we’re using the Internet to to transport information, but less and less we’re using the browser to display and interact with that information.

Even on your computer you might choose an app over the web. For example I hardly every visit Twitter the website. Since the beginning I’ve used one of available desktop clients. Same for Facebook. Most of the content I absorb online comes in though my rss reader. This post will mostly be written in a couple of programs residing on my desktop only passing through the WordPress admin briefly as a last check before publishing.

Search engines can’t crawl apps. html isn’t the dominant language across apps. Many of the things you and I do as part of our jobs aren’t as prevalent inside apps as they are on the web itself. Surely this will affect us.

Chris points out how this shift was inevitable, citing past industries with similar change and pointing out that while most of us might intellectually appreciate openness we inevitably choose the path of least resistance. Apps are simply easier and often better than their website counterparts.

In Michael’s part of the article he also argues this shift is inevitable, but for a different reason. Business can make more money through apps than through the web. Most of us won’t pay to read the news on a website, yet many of us will happily shell out a few bucks to have the paper delivered to us via an app.

None of this is to say the web is going away and the browser will die an ugly death. Apps won’t kill the web any more than the web killed tv, tv killed radio, or radio killed print. We’ll be using our browser (another app) to visit web pages for quiet some time.

While I use more and more apps, I still inevitably find most through a web page in my browser. And as great as apps might be, there’s a limit to how many we can download and realistically use before their number overwhelms us. The web through a browser isn’t going away any time soon.

Still this shift is taking place and will only accelerate as more or us carry and use internet capable mobile devices like smart phones and tablets.

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The mobile site consists of over 50 mockups that needed to be developed in HTML/CSS and made to work for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. While coding simple HTML/CSS mockups sounded pretty easy, I found that there were several hurdles and differences from doing mobile HTML and normal HTML.

Doing a mobile site from scratch was a big learning experience, so I’d thought I’d share some of the things I learned, that differed greatly for mobile dev.

Think Small

Doing mobile development means you have to think small and in terms of percentages, not pixels. You can’t have a 320px layout for the iPhone, because if you rotate the phone into landscape mode, you’ll have a skinny site running down the middle. You have to make sure the layout stays consist, while expanding for both portrait and landscape modes on the phone.

CSS3 Wonders

One of the biggest changes that were difficult for me to get over, and one of the best, was the fact that I could use CSS3 freely. I no longer had to worry about Internet Explorer, and al of the prominent mobile devices support it.

When trying to do some tricky styling without adding additional markup, I caught myself remembering that I could actually do it with nth-of-type and not having to worry about it breaking! So feel free to break out your CSS3 and even some of your HTML5 skills.

Special Meta Tags

There are a lot of little quirks in some mobile devices, but since I have an iPhone I’ll mention the ones I found in that device. The iPhone has this neat trick, where it links phone numbers in the browser and allows you to click on them and call them instantly.

This is awesome, except for the fact when it tries to do it on non-phone numbers. It seems to have difficulty sometimes determining what is and isn’t a number, especially when it comes to things like part/order numbers.

The awesome thing about Apple, however, is the fact they came up with a ton of meta tags that allow you to manipulate the way the iPhone device reads the website. I think these tags may also work on the Android, but don’t quote me on that.

To disallow the linking of phone numbers of your site, simple add this in between your <head> tags:

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

I also ran across a problem where the iPhone likes to blow up the size of text in landscape mode, which was obviously a no-no and broke our layout. This was fixed simply by adding this style to the body property:

body { -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; }

The IE of Mobile

Of course, there’s always something that has to make a developer’s life difficult, and in this case it’s Blackberry. While it’s not as bad as Internet Explorer, it still became a thorn in my side.

Apparently, some models of Blackberries don’t support CSS3 properties, like opacity. I haven’t had any problems with advanced selectors though, so I’m not sure what is and isn’t supported.

The Blackberry also seemed to interpret spacing and paddings differently from the Android and the iPhone. For the most part, besides a few text differences, the Android and iPhone were quite similar in rendering the site.

Browser-Testing

Browser, or device, testing for mobile is a bit more difficult to do than normal web browser testing. While you can download pretty much al of the web browsers if you’re on a Windows machine (or use a simulator on a Mac), I’m fairly sure most devs don’t have an iPhone, Android AND a Blackberry.

For beginning testing, it was enough to resize my Firefox window as small as possible, but most of the testing I did on my iPhone, especially because the iPhone renders inputs and some backgrounds and paddings quite differently than Firefox.

For Android and Blackberry testing, I had to rely on the help of several of my Twitter friends (thanks guys!). A lot of the simulators you can download, especially the iPhone ones, never seem to actually renders the site like the actual device would. The client also had access to all three devices, so there were a big help in finding bugs.

Teaching the Client

The problem with percentage based designs, is that it’s impossible to have it “pixel-perfect” with the mockups, because you’re not using pixels. This was something I discovered early on, and something I had to teach the client about as well, especially because they had handed me size guides with the exact pixels everything was spaced out to.

This is a bit difficult to explain to a client who wants the mockups to look exactly the same in portrait and landscape mode, but with a little persistence and documentation, it wasn’t impossible for them to become relaxed in their layout expectations. You just have to be a bit more fluid when it comes to the mobile world.

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RIM has just added a new geolocation feature to its Locate Service toolkit, which will permit BlackBerry developers to use cellular tower data when grabbing location data for their apps. This will ultimately enable apps to use cellular towers to approximate location if a user is in an area without GPS coverage.